friendship ended with DOMINOES, now Civ 3 is my best friend

September 1, 2019 3:35 PM

Constructing Logic Gates, Circuits, and Adders in Civilization 3 Using Barbarians
posted by cortex (14 comments total)

"In the beginning, the Earth was without form, and void. Then some awesome people with way too much fucking time on their hands figured out how to hack the universe...to build a legacy that would span the test of time."

This is cool. Pretty much anything is a Turing machine if you try hard enough.
posted by Room 101 at 4:03 PM on September 1, 2019

You have discovered TURING COMPLETENESS
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 4:45 PM on September 1, 2019 [6 favorites]

Strangely enough, I am reading “Three Body Problem” right now and this concept appears in that book.
posted by adamrice at 4:54 PM on September 1, 2019

Next up, implementing Civ 3 using barbarians in Civ 3.
posted by biogeo at 5:17 PM on September 1, 2019 [11 favorites]

Pretty much anything is a Turing machine if you try hard enough.

Why, you can even make a Turing machine out of a bunch of fancy rocks you dug out of the ground!
posted by tobascodagama at 5:21 PM on September 1, 2019 [5 favorites]

This is awesome.
posted by sneebler at 5:35 PM on September 1, 2019

@adamrice The idea of "Let's make a Turing Machine out of it!" is super common in computer science courses. I don't want to be too harsh on programmer humor, but let's just say that the idea becomes progressively less and less clever over the course of a 4 year degree. :D For me, the appearance of the idea in "Three Body Problem" was more than anything a marker that the author had taken some formal CS courses.
posted by Balna Watya at 5:47 PM on September 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

Didn’t someone try to compile a minimal version of Dwarf Fortress that would run on a processor built in DF? Or maybe I’m confusing elements of the 8088 emulator implemented in Minecraft...

Anyway, using rule-based computer systems to implement computer logic is fun but ultimately not terribly surprising, though the details are often interesting.

I still like the little logic canons you can build in Conway’s game of life, but I guess that’s old hat.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:00 PM on September 1, 2019

Next up, implementing Civ 3 using barbarians in Civ 3.

Why do that when you can implement Minecraft using barbarians in Civ 3, and then implement Civ 3 using Redstone in Minecraft running on barbarians in Civ 3?
posted by zachlipton at 7:03 PM on September 1, 2019 [4 favorites]

This post is missing tags "and", "or", and "xor".
posted by biogeo at 8:23 PM on September 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

"Why, you can even make a Turing machine out of a bunch of fancy rocks you dug out of the ground!"
@tobascodagama

You certainly can. Oblig: XKCD "A Bunch of Rocks"
posted by aleph at 8:52 PM on September 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

This post is missing tags "and", "or", and "xor".

Nah, all it really needs is "nand"...
posted by equalpants at 9:56 PM on September 1, 2019 [9 favorites]

@cortex, do you follow this YouTube channel or were you searching for Turing machines in civilization 4x games? I know you are interested in math/programming/logic and I'm genuinely curious as to how you stumbled upon this video. I have a feeling your google algorithm is a wonderfully curious place to live inside of. :-)
posted by Fizz at 6:57 AM on September 2, 2019

Neither! It's funny, I think I found it by total chance scrolling through mltshp. Where I also didn't find it was the paper on Turing completeness that I found the dominoes one from, which I've been enjoying for the links as much as anything and will probably give in and make a post about in its own right.

My youtube recs are routinely not-awful, which is nice, though they're more all over the board depending on what I've been watching but also what links have been broken and needed reviewing on MeFi lately. There's a couple mathy things in there right now but also some game glitching stuff and for whatever reason a scene from Terminator redubbed entirely with Half-Life 1 sound effects.
posted by cortex at 7:46 AM on September 2, 2019 [1 favorite]